Everywhere Man

This is the ballad of Caleb Landry Jones, a nice Texas boy whom you may vaguely recognize as the creepy brother in Get Out. Or maybe as the ginger sweetheart in Three Billboards. Or perhaps as the face of the latest Saint Laurent campaign. How he even got here is a small miracle, but it's probably better to let him explain.

“Well, I'm watching all these sheep walk by,” Caleb Landry Jones is saying, “and I'm thinking, I don't know if they got it more figured out or less figured out. They seem all right. But unlike the geese, they can't fly away. And the geese can fly away. I think they just don't know that they can.”

It's a Tuesday, just after the New Year, and Jones is calling from Texas, where he grew up. Talking to him over a spotty cell-phone connection is a cosmic, enjoyably disorienting experience. His sentences spin out into riffs, one-man dialogues featuring drawling impressions of his piano-teacher mom or his contractor dad, Boomhauer-esque verbal vapor trails. Right now he's doing his best to answer questions about the craft of acting, about balancing preparation and instinct, reality and, uh, hyper-reality, so when he brings up sheep and geese it sounds like a metaphor.

But it isn't. He's calling from his parents' farm. The sheep are sheep and the geese are geese, and Jones is watching two circling hawks, hoping they don't make off with a chicken.

“It sounds like a nice metaphor,” Jones concedes. “Let's use it as a metaphor, Alex. You know, Alex, it's just like sheep, you know?” He laughs. “Oh Lord, man. I shouldn't be talking about any of this.”

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Caleb Landry Jones Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters

Jones turns 30 at the end of this year. He was born in Garland and grew up in nearby Richardson, once the home of Jessica and Ashlee Simpson. He discovered acting in speech class in high school and started doing it professionally shortly thereafter, mostly in films and on TV series shot in and around his home state. That's a teenage Jones making the most of his moment as Boy on Bike (“Mister, you got a bone sticking out of your arm!”) in the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men. He also played the drummer in Landry Clarke's Crucifictorious (best-ever death-metal band from Dillon, Texas) on Friday Night Lights and Walt Junior's best friend on Breaking Bad.

“I don't know if there's such a thing as doing too good a job.”

He figured he'd pursue music; he moved out of his parents' home, got his heart broken, and poured out 40 songs about the experience in a few months. Then he booked a part in 2010's The Last Exorcism. His role consisted of more than one scene; he took it as a sign and relocated to Los Angeles to act. He broke through for real in 2017, with a string of indelible and occasionally skin-crawly performances as unsavory white dudes—the brother who grills Daniel Kaluuya about MMA in Get Out; Amanda Seyfried's abusive burnout husband on Showtime's Twin Peaks: The Return; and Red Welby in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, whose decision to rent some outdoor ad space to an aggrieved Frances McDormand leads to a whole movie's worth of complications.

The magnetic anti-charisma and blackout intensity he brought to these parts were nothing new—way back in 2014, as the “douchebag, black-metal, fucking dirt bomb” boyfriend in the Safdie brothers' micro-indie Heaven Knows What, he was already doing work that made you wonder if you were even watching an actor. But movies like Get Out and Billboards and the sneakily topical third season of Twin Peaks found broader symbolic use for his white-bread malevolence, casting him as the avatar of that which is unseemly about that which is all-American. Few actors in recent memory have committed more thoroughly to playing real creeps or worried less about picking up baggage that could render them uncastable as anything nicer. “I don't know,” Jones says when this concern is brought up, “if there's such a thing as doing too good a job.”

Lately he's modeled Sailor Ripley snakeskin for Saint Laurent's spring-summer campaign and recorded most of an album of original songs, a project that's been compared to Sgt. Pepper by people he's played it for, although Jones doesn't quite hear what they're hearing. “I don't think it's anywhere close to as good as that,” Jones says, “but it's trippy and it doesn't ever repeat itself.” The songs flow together continuously, “like some of the later Wings stuff, or the end of Abbey Road, or [Pink Floyd's] Atom Heart Mother.”

There's a project he's excited about but can't discuss yet; it's a big movie, but he's “not gonna be a superhero or anything like that.” The film turns out to be Bios, a sci-fi thriller starring Tom Hanks as the last man on Earth; Jones plays a motion-capture robot learning to love. So instead we discuss the more immediately forthcoming The Kindness of Strangers, in which director Lone Scherfig (An Education) has cast Jones against type, as a guy who just wants to help people and doesn't get thrown out of even one window. Jones is excited to have finally made a movie he can take his mother and grandmother to see: “They haven't been able to watch too many of 'em.”

“My uncle, man,” Jones says, “brings my grandma to see Three Billboards. I said, ‘Grandma, did you like it?’ She said, ‘Sure was a lot of cursing.’ ”

He doesn't enjoy getting those calls from her. “Well, they had to blow you up, didn't they?” he says, in a Texas-grandma voice. “Yeah, they did. They had to set you on fire. Yeah, they did. They had to shoot you. Yeah, they did.” Jones begins imagining the internal monologue of a sadistic casting director: “I don't know what it is about that guy—I just want to see him thrown out of a building.”

Honestly, though, he can't believe he's gotten to work with any of the directors he's worked with. “I did [a movie] with…what's his name—the singer from Limp Bizkit. I've never been a big fan of Limp Bizkit, but I was still very surprised to get to work with him. Ice Cube was in it.”

That'd be The Longshots, released in 2008, directed by nookie fancier and then budding auteur Fred Durst, with Cube as a washed-up football player helping his niece chase her dream of playing Pop Warner, and Jones as—well, he plays some guy. “Jonesy” in the credits. It's not a big part. He scrounged gas money to get himself from Texas to the set in Louisiana, showed up toward the end of shooting, and wore a football helmet most of the time. He's still never seen the finished movie; a buddy (“who bought a Mexican bootleg of it or something”) watched it and told Jones he's not really in it that much. But even that job was a dream job, at least in the sense that they're all dream jobs.

“I missed graduation [from high school] to be in that movie,” he says. “I just had a blast. I was supposed to be silly, so I was, y'know, doing high kicks. Made Ice Cube giggle, I remember. I thought, ‘Okay, you made Ice Cube giggle, that's good’—because he's supposed to be cold as ice, y'know?”

Did you feel like you'd made it when you made Ice Cube giggle?

“No,” Jones says. “But it did feel like maybe I could get another job after this. It was positive reinforcement. You're good enough for us, kid. I was thrilled to have gotten that job. I was so happy to have a reason not to be at graduation. Because I hadn't paid for the gown. Sixty dollars for a gown. It just seemed ridiculous.”

Alex Pappademasis a writer who lives in Los Angeles.

A version of this story appears in the Spring 2019 issue of GQ Style with the title “Everywhere Man.”